Mike has observed many of these things, and he's avoided the less toxic elements of those various personalities.

Persona; dangles between a nostalgic subfusc and a spellbinding lucidity

I call it calculated blandness,

We end up sort of accepting that is the lesser of evils,

People's personalities, like buildings, have various facades, some pleasant to view, some not.

I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortur